Towards the end of the NYT business section article that follows the standard narrative, they note that in BN’s 300-person Palo Alto division, “engineers were putting final touches on their fifth e-reading device, a product that executives said would be released sometime this spring.” The story also says that ceo William Lynch “plans to experiment with slightly smaller stores.” Meanwhile, Amazon offers another nebulous growth statistic to the paper. For the nine-week holiday sales period, ending December 31, “Kindle unit sales, including both the Kindle Fire and e-reader devices, increased 177 percent over the same period last year.” (Amazon will […]
Bookstores
When Larry Met Jeffrey
Bloomberg Business Week’s Brad Stone is working on a book about Amazon (not disclosed in the online version of next week’s cover story) and we should all hope that his editors help him root his narrative more in facts than the magazine piece. Here, you “big publishers” are sitting around “in high-rise offices” with “resplendent views”–while making the “screech of a small woodland creature being pursued by a jungle predator.” (Readers do not learn of Amazon Publishing NY’s space at 1350 Avenue of the Americas.) Book publishing is “an inefficient industry if there ever was one”–unlike, say, magazine publishing, where […]
BN Offers to Share Digital Reading Data and Work With Indies to Preserve Bookstores
Barnes & Noble vp of ebooks Jim Hilt told the Digital Book World audience Tuesday morning some things you aren’t accustomed to hearing from the industry’s largest chain of bookstores. Speaking to “the power of the independent bookstores,” Hilt said “the notion that we are competing with each other is, I believe, untrue.” He added, “as people move on to other forms of content, what we want to do is to be working together to get more books in front on more readers.” Without offering further specifics, Hilt suggested that BN would be willing to work with independents to help […]
Bookselling: Idlewild Adds Brooklyn Store; BYU Bookstore Lays Off 29; And More
Idlewild Books, the four-year-old travel guide and literature store that opened on 18th Street in Manhattan, has now added a second location (in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood) which will concentrate on foreign-language books, and specifically literature in French, Spanish, and Italian. “We love the neighborhood–with its strong Italian roots and growing reputation as New York’s Little France–and our neighbors have already made us feel welcome,” the store wrote in an e-mail to customers. 25 full-time employees and 4 part-timers were laid off from the Brigham Young University Bookstore on Friday. “As with bookstores across the country, in recent years, the […]
Like Thalia’s Germany, France’s Fnac Announces Restructuring As Sales Fall
Just after Germany’s biggest bookselling chain announced losses and an unspecified restructuring, French bookselling chain Fnac is in a similar position. The group says sales at their stores fell 5.4 percent in 2011 and they “expect annual current operating income to decrease by half,” citing “a severe decrease in popularity” of publications. They say “the worsening of the economic crisis over the last six months has led to a significant decrease in household spending in Europe, which is affecting Fnac’s markets in all of the countries in which it is present.” Fnac says they are working on an 80-million-euro cost […]
Thalia’s Parent May Sell, Spinoff–Or Just Sit Tight
Parent company of Germany’s largest–but ailing–book chain Thalia continues to be the focus of market gyration. First shares fell sharply on reduced earnings guidance, driven by Thalia’s difficulties competing with ebooks and online bookselling and unquantified “restructuring” costs at the bookseller. But then shares soared on news of a possible buyout. CEO Henning Kreke “told analysts at a meeting on Thursday that Douglas had been approached by investors several times in recent years and that the Kreke family, which has a 12.6 percent stake in Douglas, decided to initiate talks over a buyout because it sees the company’s shares as […]